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Greatest album sleeve

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I’ve just bought a battered old copy of this album simply because I love the sleeve so much. An iconic image of a man on the cusp off becoming the biggest thing in the music industry and much more. It’s the ordinariness of it that strikes me- it looks like what it is ie a picture of two young things caught up in each other and blissfully unaware of what is coming

Any other suggestions for great sleeves ?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d6/Bob_Dylan_-_The_Freewheelin’_Bob_Dylan.jpg

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Comments

  1. Might have helped to get the picture up – technology bah ! Bet this doesn’t work either

    https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=freewheelin+bob+dylan+cover&biw=1366&bih=576&tbm=isch&imgil=HKROAC-VrDDQAM%253A%253BBr8ttT5AGiAOaM%253Bhttps%25253A%25252F%25252Fen.wikipedia.org%25252Fwiki%25252FThe_Freewheelin'_Bob_Dylan&source=iu&pf=m&fir=HKROAC-VrDDQAM%253A%252CBr8ttT5AGiAOaM%252C_&usg=__AYGVcgihyieM66wqaWN48i_VAXA%3D&ved=0ahUKEwibh-yg4d7KAhVKCBoKHT7zCBQQyjcILA&ei=R5uzVtvHC8qQaL7mo6AB#imgrc=HKROAC-VrDDQAM%3A&usg=__AYGVcgihyieM66wqaWN48i_VAXA%3D

    • For future reference, you need to host the photo yourself on somewhere like Photobucket, rather than linking to a website or Google search result. It’s a minor pain but the only way.

  7. It’s Screamadelica for me. It captures the mood of the music and the vibe of the times. And it’s just a great, joyful painting in itself. Painted by Creation Records’ in-house artist Paul Cannell, inspired by a damp water spot he’d seen on the Creation Records offices ceiling after taking LSD, it was originally painted in yellow and blue for the single Higher Than The Sun. It was Bobby Gillespie who changed it to red. Cannell commited suicide in 2005 and so never got to see his artwork featured on a British postal stamp.

    http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u495/StingOno/imgres_zpst5poauby.jpg

  9. I too bought a battered copy of Freewheelin’, last year, mainly for the fab cover. It plays, but is noisy and skips a couple of times – definitely one for the ‘Z’ stylus. Not bad for a quid I suppose.

  14. I can’t say this is the greatest, but it has a powerful effect on me. Just seeing it, or ideally holding the vinyl cover, I get a Proustian rush where as a spotty 17 year old I can sense my friends I listened to with it at the time, smell the Party Sevens at the gatherings where we played it, feel the beer spilt carpets through the holes in my Green Flash tennis shoes, taste the lipstick of the Macc girls I optimistically snogged in dark corners to it. Fabulous.

    http://i1094.photobucket.com/albums/i449/charlieboy14/c3d30f759447c29d9d7f80daa0ec1d0c_zpsy74svpcm.jpg

    • On the Bizarro World Album thread this record is called “”My Tutti Frutti” and, on the cover, Kev covers up his nips and pearl necklace but treats us to a full frontal of his national pride (“It’s just my Manhood, it’s my Manhood”).

    • And what about the inner sleeve eh? A real retina-shredder!

      The sleeve of the contemporary Love American Style EP was magnificently 70s – a stars’n’stripes-draped kitchen with naked women hidden in it.

    • I love this one from another volume of the series. Its the knowledge that the station porter has just pushed that cap back and gone “Blahdy ‘ell, Oi’ve never seen anyfink like this” and the little boy thinking “So THIS is the promised land. Well done, Dad”

      View post on imgur.com

  23. How have we reached so far down without the greatest Prog sleeve ever?
    In the Court of the Crimson King, released 10 October 1969.

    Barry Godber, a computer programmer, painted the album cover. He died in February 1970 from a heart attack. It was his only album cover and the original painting is now owned by Robert Fripp.

    https://flic.kr/p/Do2xSN

  24. More up to date than my hippy choices above. Actually I am lying because although the Boards of Canada have a very different sound to ISB, they acknowledge they are kindred spirits. Their album covers are old-fashioned in the sense they spend sometime on the design. Music has the Right to Children is very Hipgnosis, but my favourite is from Geogaddi (a title partly inspired by Koeeoaddi Ther by ISB). The more I look at it, the more I see in this slightly sinister image:

    http://i1220.photobucket.com/albums/dd449/jimathomas/Geogaddi.jpg

  25. Bill Evans & Jim Hall – Undercurrent

    Originally released on United Artists in 1962 in a gatefold cover without any text on the front sleeve. Later issues added text and played with the colour.

    The photograph was taken by Toni Frissell in 1947, and has since been used on several other album covers. Some chancers named Suede seem to have also used this design as the basis of their latest album cover.

  26. I’ve always had a fascination with this album but for some strange reason have always pulled back from buying it. The lovely pastels, so much better on an LP cover. The understatment especially for a band known for over the top jams. I was in a record shop today and said right I’m buying it today. But they were out of stock.

    http://imgur.com/1TMAbJj

  27. My fave. Certainly not the ‘greatest’, but I love it.

    http://i1060.photobucket.com/albums/t449/GCU_Grey_Area/TOTT-front_zpsyqlpr14i.jpg

    First seen and heard at a friends, just after it came out. I hadn’t really heard of them before, but I loved the record before it was even played. The figures refer to the tracks on the LP, with more on the back. The inner spread is rather bobbins, with calligraphied lyrics. The LP is within another sleeve, with further illustrations – all by Colin Elgie/Hypgnosis.

      • Every 60s album has a classic, iconic, portait photo cover that reflects an evolving, reinvented self to reflect the evolving, reinvented music contained within. He was at it before Bowie got going.

      • Am I right in thinking that having Johnny Cash on the album would have confused the hairy tie-dye set at the time? I would have thought he was regarded as an uncool, almost establishment figure in 1969.

        But Bob was like, “Fuck off, he’s Johnny Cash!”

  42. [url=http://postimage.org/][img]http://s27.postimg.org/v5cfwlv8z/New_Order_Power_Corruption_Lies.jpg[/img][/url]
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  44. This:

    https://maryannadair.com/2014/10/12/anything-but-jarre-ing/jean-michel-jarre-equinoxe/

    Equinoxe by Jean Michel Jarre.

    The original painting is by Michel Granger, who also did his Oxygène sleeve. The original name of this painting is Le Trac (Stagefright). It’s just so perfect, and that “watcher” image is truly iconic (it’s figured large in his work, especially recently, and crops up as a motif in many places). In interviews he has said it came to accurately represent the feeling he had of becoming incredibly famous all over the world very quickly after Oxygène was released. The additional irony of course is that according to him, that image became pretty much real less than a year after this was released, when he played the Place de la Concorde on Bastille Day 1979, and a million people showed up. He described the feeling of getting up on stage that night, and looking out of ver the audience, just to see this sea of unknown faces, looking at him. It took him almost a year to recover from that night, he has said since. That idea of the massed ranks of the audience, all watching, came back to him. And now, off course, it has an added layer of meaning in the digital age.

    Certainly my favourite sleeve ever.

    • All of JMJ’s album sleeves up to and including Zoolook (woo! CGI!) are ace. (And the albums themselves, btw)

      The Concerts in China is a gorgeous double gatefold thing with all kinds of souvenirs and paraphernalia scattered around the inside and on the inner sleeves. It has the effect of making the album seem better than it is, which is the sleeve’s job.

      • Zoolook is an amazing sleeve, and an amazing album. Everyone goes bananas about Kraftwerk (rightly, and me too – looking forward to them at bluedot next month. Woo!), but that album is criminally underrated. It influenced lots of musicians, and weirdly, with many of the musicians I know, it’s a favourite. It arrived around the same time as Art of Noise’s first, and some of Yello’s stuff. But it’s hardly even mentioned as important album.

        And that CiC album is a beautifully designed thing. And even this is hardly mentioned now: the first western artist to play China since Mao; the weird initial culture clash with the audience who didn’t quite know how to react, and the fact that the British had lots to do with JMJ’s early success – Oxygene getting lots of airplay here on evening Radio 1 back in 77, and the British Embassy being at least partly responsible for Oxygene and Equinoxe getting played in China.

        Even Magnetic Fields, and the portrait photo is really striking. Love the Julien Template video of Magnetic Fields 2 as well. Very early 80s 🙂

        • Yeah. It annoys me that he’s generally thought of as a sort of electronic Richard Clayderman. For example, the use of “found voices” to create loops/sequences on Souvenir of China, Magnetic Fields 1 and the whole of Zoolook was very clever and innovative – I think probably reaching a peak on Diva, where Laurie Anderson’s non-verbal vocalese blends in perfectly.

          And like the Art Of Noise, he was often sticking funny unidentifiable noises on everything – eg. what the hell’s that knickety-knockety noise that provides the rhythm of Magnetic Fields III? I’ve never heard anything like it.

          • Laurie on Diva is great, and actually better than the original music for supermarkets version for it. But her voice is an amazing instrument full stop.

            The MF3 thing sounds faintly African., though it’s probably a really short sample of the track noises probably. I did get a huge Proustian rush though when I first went to Paris and got onto an RER train, and that bit at the end of MF2/start of MF3 just leapt into my head.

  45. Genuinely surprised that there’s been no mention of

    Sgt Pepper
    Ziggy Stardust
    Captain Fantastic
    Kimono my house
    Billion dollar babies

    Am I missing something or do I just need to get my coat?

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